Tuesday, September 11, 2007

9/11

The days and the nights are all tangling together for me, now. I am in Douglas, Alaska, helping my 82 year old mother, and my 90 years 'young' father with household tasks and all of the daily challenges of living as someone who is aging and aged, frail or sturdy, weak or strong.

And with several posts ready to be loaded on an already overloaded, somewhat aged computer, who also is challenged and challenging, I suddenly noticed the date on the tool bar. And it hit me, hit me just like the brick that my mother says she can feel in her head. The brick that keeps you from being able to think clearly, or make choices or face the next task in a daily lineup of tasks you are too tired to even remember, much less face.

The brick or bricks that fell from the sky on that fateful day of September 11, 2001. The 'bricks' that changed not only thousands of affected families lives, but the collective life of an unconscious nation. Nineteen terrorists and 4 commandeered airplanes created loss and havoc in their lives, their families' lives and our lives, forever.

It as the wake up call heard around the world. One whose repercussions we had not yet heard or even felt. One which was misunderstood, misinterpreted and misjudged. But it doesn't matter who fires the shot, throws the brick, pilots the airplanes, or even what specific cause or religion or rationalization they used for creating death and destruction.

What matters is that suddenly this nation, through the collective suffering of thousands of families, realized just how connected we all truly are. And in that almost instantaneous understanding, we woke up....maybe not completely, maybe not permanently, but something inside of each of us woke up.... and felt a deep down universal pain.

In honor and in memory, I think of that event, of those losses of that tragic day in history. I put my other post on 'hold', as well as my own exhaustion, my own challenges, my own things I need to do, or be ,or get done, or accomplish.

Today, I think of all of them. And I am grateful to them for what they gave to all of us with their deaths. There are many who say they are all our angels now. Maybe, they truly are, and maybe the angelic order doesn't actually work that way. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they sacrificed their earthly lives and created a universal opening in our national consciousness. And for that I am deeply grateful.

In honor, and in memory, please pause today and think of all of them, of all of their families. In honor and in memory, think of all of those who have sacrificed their lives for the good of others....the policemen, the firemen, the rescue workers, the doctors or nurses or teachers or just those who went in to help and are paying, in many different ways, for that sacrifice now and tomorrow.